The £5 Tee, the £100 Tee, and Where We Landed

We wanted to do a summer tee. It's a staple, everyone owns a drawer of them, and well, I wanted a version that was ours (selfishly!).

Except we have a rule that everything has to be best in its category or we don't make it. That rule is written down and I read it back regularly. So a t-shirt, the simplest thing in your wardrobe, turned out to be a proper job.

Before a single sample got ordered I did what I always do with a new product and disappeared down a rabbit hole for weeks. Fabrics, weights, factories, certifications, printing methods. T-shirts genuinely surprised me. You can buy one for a fiver in a supermarket. You can buy one for a hundred quid with a designer name on the chest. Same basic object, big ol’ difference in price. I wanted to know where the money actually goes at both ends, because that's the only way to work out where we should sit.

Here's what I found.

The £5 end

Think about what has to happen for a cheap tee to exist. Cotton grown in a field, picked, spun into yarn, knitted into cloth, dyed, cut, sewn, boxed, shipped halfway round the world, trucked to a warehouse, trucked again to the shop, hung on a rail. Then sold to you for five pounds, with profit still in it for the shop.

Somebody in that chain is getting squeezed. Go far enough back down the line and you find who. Cotton is one of the most chemically hammered crops on the planet, and the cheaper the shirt, the heavier the spraying and the harder the people at the machines get pushed. The fabric's thin because thin is cheap. That's the whole reason those tees go see-through and shapeless within a summer.

Of course, they’re not going to tell you that at the till.

The £100 end

The other end didn’t surprise me at all. Don’t get me wrong, some expensive tees really are beautiful material, and you can feel it the moment you pick one up. But, the bigger majority aren't anything special at all once you look at how they're made. What you're paying for is the name printed on the front, plus every layer of markup between the factory and the shop floor. (I’m currently writing a whole other post about this, and why we only sell directly to customers)

Where we landed

We could charge more. We choose not to. The whole idea of Bear&Wolf is making the best version of a thing and selling it at a price that doesn't make me wince, and I can admit a £100 tee makes me wince. You're paying for the product here, nothing else.

So, £38. I’m going to break our tee down here. The cotton's organic, grown without the GM seed and chemical spray most cotton gets, and it's GOTS-certified, which means an independent body checks that claim rather than taking anyone's word for it. The cloth is made under Fair Wear Foundation rules, so the people at the machines are paid properly and work somewhere safe, and that gets audited too. 

The tee itself is made abroad because honestly (and a few won’t like this!), we asked UK manufacturers and that’d have pushed us above that £100 retail price for a product that was no better.. The printing is done in the UK, more on that later.

Wearing the no-go’s.

So, research was telling me what good looked like on paper. Then it’s time to wear it. If you see videos of me, I’m often not wearing Bear&Wolf kit (sad I know!) but because my job is testing existing kit, finding out how we improve on them, what annoys me, and what’s good. You get the point. I sampled a few before landing on our tee. Light enough for a warm day on the Moray coast, but enough body to hold its shape and stay decent wash after wash. If you like numbers it's 155gsm.

The print, and the label that isn't there

The printing is done by a UK shop that's been screen printing since the 1970s. Proper screen printers, not a website that spits out blanks. Real people who care how it comes out.

And there's no neck label. We left the scratchy one off on purpose, because nobody likes the label that saws at the back of your neck all day. The info's printed on the inside neck instead. Same information, none of the itch.

Small things. Small things are the whole job.

The honest bit

I'm not having a go at anyone buying the fiver ones. Money's real. But if you've ever wondered what actually separates a cheap tee from a dear one, that's it. Where the cotton comes from, who made it and how they were treated, how heavy the cloth is, how the print goes on.

None of it's the cheapest way to make a tee. That's the point.

The Summer Tee comes in Forest, Bone and Slate. £38, or two for £70. The Wolf Pack got theirs first, as always.